Malware attempting to move a value into $zero in MIPS?

Question

Recently I have been trying to reverse engineer an IoT malware called NyaDrop using IDA. There I came across this mysterious assignment a few times. addiu $zero, 0xA as well as move $at, $at

Both instructions seem to be just redundant but I feel like they are there for a reason. Does anyone have any idea what that reason is? My guess is that is trying to avoid an emulated MIPS perhaps? Because it would error on an emulated MIPS but will just be discarded in a real one. Not sure, however.

Here is a snippet from the disassembly of nyaDrop that is particularly confusing.

addiu   $zero, 0xA
move    $at, $at
move    $at, $at
//end of malware

Answer 1

You can write values to the $zero register, it will simply remain zero.

These 3 instructions are NOPs.